Wanted: An education reformer

By Joel Klein

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS|

Sep 09, 2013 | 4:19 AM

The Democratic contenders for mayor, in debate. (James Keivom/James Keivom-Pool)

Tuesday, New York City primary voters will head to the polls to select the Democratic nominee for mayor. Odds are, the winner will end up victorious in November’s general election and lead this city for the next four years. The race has been hotly contested and at times tragically comical. What it hasn’t been is informative — most especially on the topic of continuing Mayor Bloomberg’s efforts to reform our public education system.

We’ve heard plenty from the candidates about issues that almost no one would disagree with: providing universal pre-k and additional after-school and support services, for instance. But we’ve heard next to nothing from the candidates on what they would do to support ongoing education reform initiatives like expanding the number of excellent, innovative district and charter schools throughout the five boroughs and looking for other ways to give parents more quality educational options.

I wonder if the candidates even know that this year there were 70,000 applicants, almost all from black and Latino families, for the 20,000 seats in the more than 150 charter schools that opened under Bloomberg’s watch. That leaves 50,000 families with no other choice but to send their children to neighborhood schools they are desperately trying to escape.

You would think that Democratic candidates — who talk a lot about their commitment to improving the lives of black and Latino families — wouldn’t hesitate to increase the number of educational choices for low-income families. You would be wrong. Doing that would upset powerful special interests in the Democratic Party, which is not something the candidates are prepared to do.

So, to cite just one example, most of the candidates want to stop allowing public charter schools to share space in underutilized public school buildings. Without that lifeline, many charters couldn’t survive, much less thrive, in incredibly costly New York City.

Beyond repeating a few bromides, none of the candidates has really addressed issues like what they would do to turn around low-performing schools — or how they will prepare teachers to successfully implement the new Common Core standards. The list goes on.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’m not a casual observer. I spent eight years as chancellor of New York City’s public schools under this mayor. Before his election, the public school system was a wreck, and change didn’t come easily. For too many bureaucrats and political special interests, the status quo was a way of life.

Most politicians ignored the deep-rooted problems in the city’s public schools for decades. Bloomberg didn’t. He closed more than 150 failing schools and replaced them with more than 600 new, high quality, often much smaller, traditional public and charter schools.

The results, reflexively pilloried by some of those running for mayor, speak for themselves. After more than a decade of stagnation, the high school graduation rate rose by over 20 points across the city, with some especially notable increases at the new, smaller schools. Student achievement improved — whether measured by New York’s old academic standards, or by the state's new, more rigorous common core standards.

After years of trailing the more affluent and homogeneous school districts across the state, New York City public school students — many of whom come from low-income, minority families — are now performing almost on par with those districts. This is a major accomplishment that proves, once again, that poverty is not destiny.

While these improvements are encouraging, they are not nearly enough. There is much work left to be done by the next mayor. It will take more than feel-good proposals to get the job done. We can’t just graduate more kids from high school. We have to graduate them ready for success in college or career. Meeting that goal will take, among other things, courage and leadership.

There are at least 50,000 families in this city who don’t have a City Hall lobbyist or a political action committee and they want to know what — if anything — the people running to succeed Bloomberg will do to help them. Unfortunately, the Democratic candidates haven’t answered that question in time for any one of those families to make an informed choice tomorrow.

I hope that, before New Yorkers cast their ballots in November’s general election, both the Democratic and Republican candidates will tell us all what kind of education mayor they plan to be: one who will continue to move reform forward, or one who will take us back to the bureaucratic dysfunction of the past.

Klein was chancellor of the New York City schools from 2002 through 2010. He is CEO of Amplify, a News Corporation company.